Friday, April 22, 2011

King Cobra

Some scientists, are working on bio-genetically altering animals (like they do). An evil red head (Malachi from Children of the Corn) takes over the lab. The experiment goes wrong and almost everyone in the lab dies, some from the explosion, and some from the 30-foot king cobra (with a rattle in his tail for some reason) that magically appears without any explanation.

Cut to two years later (…really? That’s a long time for a giant snake not to get some notice…). The snake is on a killing spree all around town. The local doctor is leaving the town for bigger and better things and his girlfriend (the town sheriff) is trying to get him to stick around. But they both get called on by the people to stick around town and help with all these mysterious deaths. The mayor (the guy from Gremlins) knows they’ll take care of it.

Apparently all around this small town are hundreds of serpentologists who can just show up at the drop of a hat. One of those serpentologists (or herpetologists, actually) is Mr. Miagi. He doesn’t have much going on, so he rolls over to the slowly disappearing city and tries to figure out what he can do. The town is midway through a beer festival, so there’s lots of rowdies walking around all the parks with blue party cups dancing like idiots. And a hilarious cameo by Eric Estrada, who’s playing a flaming gay peg-leg-pants-wearing fifi-dog-holding boyfriend of a townsperson, does absolutely nothing for this movie at all. Does he even have street cred anymore, or influence people to buy poorly written movies? Nope.

The small town doctor is still trying to get away to the big city when they find out the only other doctor in town has been eaten by the snake. So the guy at the local gun store just starts throwing guns into the hands of anyone wearing camouflage. The mayor shuts down the beer festival. And then we find out why the cobra has a rattle—because a cobra was gene spliced with a diamond back rattlesnake to produce a super-aggressive test specimen, DUR.

The sheriff sends all kinds of people out into the woods with guns to hunt this thing. Mr. Miagi is trying to trap the thing instead of kill it, since he’s a scientist. The other people are just trying to stay alive. Sadly, I’m not sure if it’s the snake that is killing the townspeople or the terrible special effects. Ridiculous slow motion, poorly edited shots, super fake snake models that roar like lions, echo-y voices in dream sequences, and Mr. Miagi spinning around on a blurry merry-go-round—any one of these things could have killed one of the townspeople hahahaha.

This is a pretty boring movie, even as far as bio-genetically engineered giant aggressive animal movies go. There’s nothing you aren’t expecting, no plot twists, and pretty awful acting. Don’t bother with this one. It isn’t going to change anyone’s life and now my eyes hurt from rolling them so much…I should have grabbed that 40 of King Cobra beer to make this one more palatable. It couldn’t hurt.